Cyber crime is moving up on the agenda for organisations everywhere, particularly for professional practices that rely on data integrity and security to retain trusted relationships with clients. Statistics show that all businesses are likely to be the victim of cyber crime at some stage. The only questions that remain unanswered are: What form will it take? How early will it be identified? How will executives react?

Speaking to the Managing Partners’ Forum in London on Tuesday 21 June, Paul Fennell, cyber investigator at K2 Intelligence, discussed possible answers to these questions. During the one-hour workshop, he highlighted the risks of ransomware, distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), patching vulnerabilities, and spear phishing.

Discussing spear phishing specifically, Paul referenced an attack targeted at iPhone users carried out in May. As part of this attack, personal information obtained through a previous breach was used in an SMS that asked users to follow a link within the message to update their personal details. It is estimated that 1 in 9 of those targeted fell for the scam.

“It is important to be aware of the threats that are out there,” Paul said. “Cyber crime is an ever increasing threat and one that organisations need to mitigate against by looking to their training procedures and intelligence gathering process.”